The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Wreschner - Ernst Platner's und Kant's Erkenntnisstheorie
Three editions of Ernst Platner's chief philosophical work, Philosophical Aphorisms, appeared between 1776 and 1800. The second edition was published in 1784, and, as it was nearly completed before the publication of Kant's K. d. r. V., it does not show any great influence of this latter. The third edition, as a result of this influence, however, was very much modified, and, as P. said in his preface, the work appeared in a completely changed form. Besides the K. d. r. V., Tetens's Philosophical Essays seem to have exerted a great influence upon P. This influence is especially prominent in the modification which the second edition received. It is also shown, when in the third edition P. protests against Kant's separation of sense and understanding. Tetens, although discriminating between feeling and perception, and showing the former to be a passive modification of the mind, while the latter involves a judgment, yet repeatedly insisted that both have one origin. He sought to show that all activities of the mind, feeling, understanding, and will, are of the same nature, and are only distinguished from each other by degree. Schulze's Aenesidemus also seems to have made a great impression upon P. The scepticism of the third edition seems to owe its origin in great measure to this work. Although P. owes more to Kant in the third edition than to either of these works, yet he takes up a critical attitude to the firm foundations and exact boundaries which the latter professes to have found for knowledge in the Æsthetic and Analytic. It is also clear that, although influenced by Kant, he sought to find an independent position for himself. As he said, Kant's writings gave him "matter for consideration and stimulus for controversy."